Imagine in My Life

Imagine In My Life by Jim Patterson

October 2015. 

On October 9, John Lennon, one of the greatest musicians and peace activists of the 20th century, would have been 75. Lennon was also a complicated person based on his troubled relationship with his family, his views of the disabled, and his reported drug use.

 John Lennon was no saint, but his music, I believe, had and continues to have a positive influence on the world. On a Liverpool bus tour of locations associated with the Beatles, the band’s songs played for the enjoyment of tourists from many countries. The only English many of my bus mates could speak were the lyrics to the John Lennon-Paul McCartney songs, including “Yesterday,” “In My Life,” and others.

Lennon’s solo masterpiece “Imagine," which he said he could not have written without his second wife Yoko One, is a beautiful testament to Lennon’s complicated life. The song, released in the U.S. on October 11, 1971 when Lennon was 31, plays continuously on the Internet, radio stations, and in the minds of people across the globe.

 When I first heard “Imagine” I was in segregated high school in Alabama. I loved the Beatles mucus of the 1960s despite the prevailing opinion in my small town that the Beatles were q***r, communists and “against God.” Because I loved the Beatles, I was considered the same as I imagined “a brotherhood of man.”

On the concluding episode of the groundbreaking 1973 PBS series “An American Family,” widely considered the first reality TV program and which controversially introduced gay son Lance Loud to TV audiences, Lennon’s “Imagine” closed the series. Though Loud’s sexuality was unstated in the documentary, his words, residence at New York's Hotel Chelsea, male companions, makeup and family interactions left little doubt he was gay.

In the final frozen scene from “An American Family,” set in Santa Barbara, California, Loud embraced himself as he stood next to his father Bill Loud who had a forced smile on his face. “Imagine” was used to imagine an America where gay sons could be accepted by their families. (In 2016 Lance Loud, lost to AIDS in 2002, would have been 65.)

In my life I was watching Monday Night Football with my grandfather in 1980 when ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell announced John Lennon had been shot and rushed to Roosevelt Hospital in New York. “Dead on arrival,” Cosell told the world.

As a diplomat in Mexico City, I shopped at a Liverpool Department store in a mall. The video of Lennon dressed in white in a white room and playing a white piano sang “Imagine.”

 Lennon’s “childhood” home in Liverpool is open by appointment through the United Kingdom's National Trust. In the kitchen, a guest book rested on a table when I visited. I saw a photo on the wall of a very young Lennon with guitar and standing on an outdoor stage. I asked the curator what age Lennon would have been in the photo.

“Fifteen,” he told me.

I asked because Lennon had a cigarette in his mouth.

At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, where I am a member and a donor, I saw a blowup of a February 4, 1972, confidential letter from segregationist GOP U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, South Carolina, urging then-Attorney General John Mitchell to deport anti-Vietnam war activist Lennon, then living in New York. Lennon was not deported. Thurmond, the father of a mixed-race daughter, died in 2003 at age 101. Mitchell served 19 months in prison due to Watergate crimes. Lennon’s revenge?

Prior to YouTube, “Imagine” played in my mind as I recalled the deaths of my grandfather, my parents, my daughter, and on the morning of September 11, 2001, as I sat in my Washington DC office and saw the city become a war zone. The song also plays mentally when I visit the 9/11 memorials in Manhattan and at the Pentagon. As the song plays, I imagine a world "living life in peace."

Though Lennon had a complicated personal life, and controversial views on drugs, the disabled, and Christianity, I hear a unifying message in "Imagine."

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Jim Patterson is published in Washington Post, Foreign Service Journal, Episcopal New Yorker, In These Times, American Writer, Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington DC's The Hill, Government Executive, Washington Window, Choices, Horizons, Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco Examiner, Bay Times, Auburn Magazine, Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser, Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, Washington Times, Des Moines Register, many more.

 Memberships: Life Member American Foreign Service Association, National Book Critics Circle, California Historical Society, Friend of President Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library, Computer History Museum, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Fraternity of Alpha Zeta, Helen Keller International, Alabama Historical Association, others.

Note: Celebrity news site WhoSay ran "Imagine My Life" Oct. 9, 2015. The site had a very large audience and following: US Alexa Rank: 6,612 Facebook: 266.5K fans Twitter: 79.1K followers. As of October 9, 2020, we received the following message: "Where did the content go? It is with some sadness that we must inform you that we decommissioned the WHOSAY talent application effective June 15th, 2018. 

Changes at all the major platforms have led to all social networks increasingly limiting access to their services by third party apps like ours. 

We expect these limitations to increase even further over time, making it very difficult to invest in or even sustain basic levels of technical reliability and feature enhancement for our application - and thus for our users.

Unfortunately, the many transformations in mobile and social since we launched our talent app (back before there was even Instagram!) have made the development and support of the talent app unsustainable.

All app data, including the pages on whosay.com that it created have been securely deleted. As a result you won’t have to do anything to protect your information. 

As many of you know, over the last eight years WHOSAY has grown into the largest talent-driven and creative marketing company in the influencer space, and we are now part of the Viacom family.

With their help we are growing this business even more quickly and will continue to bring premium marketing opportunities to the talent community for years to come.

We thank you for being a loyal WHOSAY Talent App user and apologize for any inconvenience this change causes.

Regards,

Steve Ellis, CEO, WHOSAY